Friends Association for Higher Education

The Quakers of Color International Archive:
Meet Our New Interviewees & Host/Exhibitor
For Educators, Students, Scholars, and the General Public

This Black History Month, the BlackQuaker Project is blessed to announce that our Quakers of Color International Archive (QCIA) has a new home at the Haverford College Library’s Quaker and Special Collections, which has released 17 new interviews from distinguished Friends of Color around the world. These videotaped interviews and transcriptions are now available to educators, students, scholars, and the general public online at TriCollege Libraries Digital Collections: Quakers of Color International Archives Oral Histories. Our initial wave of 13 interviews remain available online through the UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Library’s Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center.

Conceived by Harold D. Weaver Jr. as a multi-media study-and-research collection by and about Quakers of Color worldwide, the QCIA launched in spring 2019 with a pilot program of in-person interviews championed and overseen by Friend Robert F. Cox, the late director of Special Collections and University Archives at UMass Amherst. Videotaped and transcribed Interviews with the following Friends of Middle Eastern, African, African American, and Caribbean descent are now available at Haverford:

1. Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Palestinian American. Bethesda Friends Meeting.Write to hc-special@haverford.edu for access to her interview and transcript.
2. Lauren Brownlee, Deputy Secretary of Friends Council on National Legislation (FCNL). African American. Bethesda Friends Meeting.
3. Francisco Burgos, Executive Director, Pendle Hill. Dominican American. Harrisburg Friends Meeting.
4. Oskar Castro, Coordinator, Quaker Voluntary Service in Philadelphia. Puerto Rican. Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting.
5. Brian Corr, Deputy Monitor & Community Liaison, Louisville Community Commitment Consent Decree; Member of the Board of Directors, AFSC; Former Executive Director, Police Review & Advisory Board, City of Cambridge. African American. Friends Meeting at Cambridge. 
6. Rashid Darden, Associate Secretary of Communications and Outreach, Friends General Conference (FGC). African American. Friends Meeting of Washington.
7. Debby Flack, Britain Yearly Meeting Reparations Committee; Volunteer Witness, Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine. Caribbean British. Godalming Quaker Meeting, UK.
8. Keith Harvey, Former AFSC Northeast Regional Director. African American. New England Yearly Meeting of Friends. 
9. Ayesha Imani, CEO of Sankofa Freedom Academy.  African American. Ujima Friends Meeting and Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting.
10. Phliip Lord, Former Presiding Clerk, AFSC; Executive Director of the Tenant Union Representative Network (TURN). African American. Ujima Friends Meeting and Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting.
11. Samuel Chi-Yuen Lowe, Chaplain at the Boston Medical Center; former AFSC Board and Third-World Coalition member. Chinese American. Framingham Friends Meeting.
12. Hezron Masitsa, Justice & Peace Secretary, Friends World Committee for Consultation World Office. Kenyan. Nairobi Yearly Meeting. 
13. Clinton Pettus, Former Clerk of the Board, Pendle Hill; Former Associate General Secretary, AFSC. African American. Third Haven Friends Meeting.
14. Paula Rhodes, Attorney; Professor Emerita of Law, University of Denver; former Board Member, AFSC.  African American. Mountain View Friends Meeting.
15. Diane Rowley, Emerita Professor of the Practice of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; former Board Member, AFSC. African American. Atlanta Monthly Meeting.
16. Niyonu Spann, Organizational Developer, Founder of Beyond Diversity 101; former Executive Director of the Green Circle Program. African American. Chester Friends Meeting.
17. Dwight Wilson, Educator, Administrator, First African American General Secretary of FGC, Former Headmaster of the Detroit Friends School. African American. Ann Arbor Friends Meeting. 

We owe these exciting developments to the longtime support of our QCIA Advisory Committee: Mary Crauderueff, Curator of Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College; Curator Emerita Dr. Emma Lapsansky-Werner; and Jordan Landes, Curator of Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College. We are also grateful for the dedicated work of senior team member Cooper Vaughn, responsible for scheduling, producing, and, since 2025, conducting all interviews; and the contributions of former team members Jasmine Reed, Laura Mercedes, and Katalina Kastrong, all alums of the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship.

We share observations from two members of our QCIA Advisory Committee about the importance of this QCIA collection–now at Haverford–to Quakerism and to the accurate telling of world history: 

Mary Crauderueff
Curator of the Haverford College Library’s Quaker and Special Collections:

“This exceptional, growing collection of oral histories of Quakers of Color from around the world is important to Quaker history in general, and assuredly will be used by scholars, students, and Quakers around the world.”

Emma Lapsansky-Werner
Professor Emerita of History at Haverford College and Emerita Curator of the Haverford College Library’s Quaker and Special Collections:

“It is exciting to see Haverford College’s Quaker Collection providing a home to an archive of what “Quakerism” looks like as that small cell of 17th-century northern-European Friends has moved across the world–and across the centuries to embrace–and to be outnumbered by–adherents from  “the global south”-The interviews will form an invaluable trove of information for future scholars and religious “seekers”–to enrich understanding of religious inquiry and behaviors!”

We hope you will explore the archive and welcome any thoughts or questions you wish to share. In the future, we expect to  spotlight the remarkable lives of various interviewees from our Haverford and UMass Amherst installation of our QCIA collection. 

Are there specific Quakers of Color worldwide that you would like to see interviewed? Are there questions of interest which you would like to see us pose in the future? How do you find these interviews especially enlightening? Please write to us for any suggestions or questions at theblackquakerproject@gmail.com.

Peace and Blessings,

The BlackQuaker Project
Wellesley Friends Meeting, 
New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)
www.theblackquakerproject.org   
12 February 2026

The BlackQuaker Project is thrilled to announce the recent release of the new, timely Pendle Hill audiobook narrated and written by Harold D. Weaver, Jr.: Race, Systemic Violence, and Retrospective Justice: An African American Quaker Scholar-Activist Challenges Conventional Narratives. You may order it on Audible.

Professor Weaver brings to life his seminal 2020 Pendle Hill pamphlet (now in its second edition after the initial printing of 2,000 copies) with the warmth, magnetism, and clarity of a public intellectual whose lectures for decades have enriched universities, film festivals and fora, and international conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In this new audiobook of his BQP manifesto for 21st century-Quakerism, Friend Weaver offers listeners concrete steps to meet the material and spiritual demands of these dire times. The following actions are among those recommended for Quakers and others seeking true peace, justice, and equity:

1. Contributing to the ongoing international debate on reparations by adopting a Quaker model of Retrospective Justice to address past and recent injustices, such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, chattel slavery in the Americas, settler colonialism and other forms of European oppression in Africa, and Jim Crow and follow-up repression of African Americans in the USA. Drawing from the groundbreaking 2006 Brown University report, Slavery and Justice, we define Retrospective Justice as “an attempt to administer justice years after the commission of a severe injustice or series of injustices against persons, communities, or racial and ethnic groups.” To achieve this objective of justice, we advise Friends to take the following chronological steps: (1) acknowledge an offense, but do not apologize; (2) commit to truth-telling through in-depth research to uncover the depths and range of the injustice committed; and (3) make amends in the present via programs of political, economic, psychological, cultural, and spiritual rehabilitation and healing, including various forms of material and non-material reparations.
2. Confronting Structural Violence with anti-violence. This particular type of violence is defined by British Friend Adam Curle as “the political and economic inequalities which are built into the social structure.” Palestinian Quaker scholar and leader Sister Jean Zaru expanded on Professor Curle’s definition of structural violence in her 2008 book, Occupied with Non-Violence: A Palestinian Woman Speaks, with five universal forms of structural violence, which we apply to the African American reality in the USA (with a specific example for each): (1) economic structural violence (poverty), (2) political structural violence (voter disenfranchisement, militarization of law enforcement ), (3) cultural structural violence (omission and distortion of African American history), (4) religious structural violence (islamophobia), and (5) environmental structural violence (lead poisoning in Flint, MI, and the “cancer corridor” from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, LA). Our BlackQuaker Project audiobook and pamphlet have expanded her list, with the addition of two new major categories: health structural violence (prescription overpricing) and educational structural violence (school-to-prison pipeline). Challenging these forms of systemic violence will require a mobilization of local and national energy, organization, mutual aid, and massive funding. The overwhelming scope of this undertaking requires us to be radically anti-violent, not merely non-violent in challenging traditional direct violence.
   Note: In citing Palestinian Friend Zaru, we wish to remind readers of the current genocide against her people.
3. Placing Justice, too often neglected, front-and-center in our Quaker testimonies. We again cite Friend Adam Curle, founder of Peace Studies in the UK, who stated: “Justice has a twofold meaning: one spiritual–righteousness, the observance of the divine law; the other temporal– fairness, righteous dealing, integrity….[Our] vision of justice is the result of seeking to live in virtue of nonviolence, compassion, redemption, and love.” Can we have peace without justice? Can we have equality without justice? We think not.
4. Replacing SPICES as an acronym for Quakerism–initially created for non-Quakers–with “JaM with SPICES:” Justice and Mercy with Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. This is recommended only as an initial step towards moving beyond SPICES entirely as, in the long run, can any acronym convey the dynamic, complex, international phenomenon that Quakerism is today? Our ministry is doubtful. What do you think?

About the Author

Now in his 92nd year, Friend Hal Weaver was first exposed to Quakerism as a 16-year-old student at the Westtown School, followed by 4 years at Haverford College. Drafted into the US Army in 1957, Hal later made the difficult decision to become a conscientious objector when he was assigned to train others to kill. Weaver acknowledges the impact that Dr. King’s non-violent human-rights sturggle had on his decision. In recent decades, Friend Weaver has assumed governance roles in various Quaker organizations: the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker United Nations Office, Cambridge Friends School, Friends General Conference, and Haverford College, his alma mater. From this, he learned where Quakerism stood in the modern world and where it needed improvement, most acutely in the involvement of Quakers of Color.

Hal’s work continues through his BlackQuaker Project ministry, the fruits of which include the groundbreaking anthology, Black Fire: African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights (print 2011, audiobook 2025), edited with Paul Kriese and Stephen W. Angell, and his 2021 Friends Journal Article, “A Proposed Plan for Retrospective Justice (2021),” developed from his 2020 Pendle Hill pamphlet. In his latest written book, Race, Decolonization, and the Cold War: African Student Elites In Moscow, 1955-1964 (2025), Professor Weaver applies his unique perspective as a Quaker scholar-activist of African descent to his challenge of traditional Cold War stereotypes about African students in Moscow in the 1960’s, now available through Africa World Press. His 2026 Pendle Hill audiobook, Race, Systemic Violence, and Retrospective Justice: An African American Quaker Scholar-Activist Challenges Conventional Narratives, is available to order here.

How do you feel about Retrospective Justice, structural violence and anti-violence, the importance of the Justice testimony, and the need to replace SPICES? We welcome your thoughts and feelings on these important BQP recommendations: theblackquakerproject@gmail.com .

Here is a link to a PDF of this newsletter:

Peace and Blessings,
The BlackQuaker Project
Wellesley Friends Meeting
New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)
4 February 2026